"This is a book of short pieces in verse or prose, an attempt to recover or otherwise conjure up a particular time (the 1940s), a particular Black Country town (Oldbury) and a particular childhood (mine). There is, I will confess, some unreliability here. I start with good intentions and a true memory - day-old chicks, street lamps, a clip round the ear - but soon, often as not, the fictional habit kicks in and I am led astray. One sentence lures me on to another, has the seeds of another in it, or is a template almost. Like knitting, that first row of stitches which sets up the rest. Or a rhyme reveals, or the need to avoid a rhyme reveals, some possibility. And I follow."
Allan Ahlberg, The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood.
That passage, and the book's epigraph (below), seem to link neatly to the final paragraph in yesterday's post.
"If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it."
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.
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